Mentioned in the House: Which Places Does Parliament Talk About? Place Mentions in House of Commons Debates, 1909 to 2026

Which towns and cities does the House of Commons talk about, and which does it ignore? I count place mentions in Hansard, the verbatim record of Commons debates, without downloading any speech text: the UK Parliament Hansard API returns the number of spoken contributions that contain a phrase in each year. For 1,661 UK place names I counted contributions containing "in" followed by the name, from 1909 to 2025, a measure that avoids the division lists, the "hon. Member for" formula and surnames that inflate simple name counts. Ambiguous names are handled transparently: shared names and foreign namesakes are excluded, and for 59 names that are also ordinary words a capital-letter check on a sample of contributions gives a precision by which counts are scaled. London took 16.1% of all town and city mentions from 2005 to 2025, down from 48.8% in the 1910s. Mentions rise faster than population (an elasticity of 1.34), and some medium towns, led by Kettering at 6.47 times its expected count, draw far more attention than their size predicts. Most places have one exceptional year, which debate titles link to plant closures, attacks and Bills. For 946 Commons seats in use from 2005, the seat's own member spoke a median of 8.5% of the contributions naming it. The counts, code and an interactive map are open. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/hansard-places/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/hansard-places. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/hansard-places/.